


Dust to Dust

by Shachaai



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 12:49:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19746091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/Shachaai
Summary: Assassins + Adventurer/Explorer + DemonsThere is nothing particularly holy about the Holy Cities. They are not, however,unholy: no demon has ever breached the walls of a Holy City, unlike many, many settlements out in the Dust.





	Dust to Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted from my tumblr.
> 
> The original prompts were F!France/Any, Assassins + Adventurer/Explorer + Demons. Combined, they were always going to be Indiana Jones-y or Supernatural Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia, and I’ve only seen one IJ movie - so apocalyptic ‘fun’ it is. This ended up as f!France/f!Eng/Port + Canada + many mentions of others, because I’m (obviously) weak for that threesome, regardless of its gender mix-up. This was getting ridiculously long, but the idea seized hold of me, and I hope to revisit it eventually, when I have less to do.
> 
>  **A few important warnings:** this mix-up contains blood, violence, some body horror (humanoid demons), mentions of violent death and onscreen violent death (of demons), and worries about pregnancy in a post-apocalyptic world. I also kinda interpreted ‘assassins’ as ‘specialised killers’.
> 
> Marianne = f!France, Gabriel = Portugal, Elaine = f!England

**I.**

“The target should be about ten minutes north of here,” Matthew says quietly, looking up from the directions in his notebook and trying not to squint as a slant of early afternoon sun hits him straight in the eyes.

Marianne and Gabriel had agreed as one to give Matthew the directions to read before setting out - the boy is the best in their settlement of New Spring at reading Gilbert’s scrawl after Ludwig, Gilbert’s brother, and had needed something to focus on rather than his own nerves. This is only Matthew’s third trip out into the Dust as part of Marianne and Gabriel’s target group, and it is obvious he is still a little too intimidated by his partners to do a good job as a general lookout. He is trying though, and giving him an immediate focus has helped.

With the hand not on her sword, Marianne reaches out and pats him on the head. “Good job!” 

Matthew wince-smiles at her for the pat, shuffling his shoulders a little in embarrassment as he stuffs the notebook back in his pack, almost knocking over the quiver of arrows he has beside it. Really, Matthew is probably getting too old for such things; Marianne can only comfortably pat his and his brother’s head when they are sitting down these days, for the two boys have shot up like weeds in the past few months. It is good - so _very_ good - to see them grow, but Marianne does so miss the days when they had still been little and innocent of the world and had clung to her legs.

“Congratulations are better saved for when we get there,” says Gabriel, a rather grim shadow at the nearest window, silhouetted by sun and the frame of old broken glass. He doesn’t turn around to see the face Marianne makes at his back - though Matthew sees it and has to hide his smile in his fist - because it is his turn on lookout, and nowhere outside New Spring is safe for any of them, even during the hottest and lightest part of the day. With one of his bonded in the group behind him and their other bonded waiting no doubt incredibly impatiently back at the settlement…

“Grumpy,” Marianne chides softly, pushing herself back up to her still rather tired feet so she can go to her bonded’s side and touch the tense muscle of his non-dominant arm.

Gabriel is carrying too much worry on his back these days. The deep downward crease of his mouth makes him very rugged, very handsome, but it is not like him to be curt with someone who doesn’t deserve it. _Matthew,_ sweet lamb, doesn’t deserve it, because Gabriel is only curt because he is stressed, and he is only stressed because Matthew is young and not truly accustomed to working with them both yet.

Or perhaps, most importantly, Gabriel is stressed for the same reason Marianne is more stressed than usual - because Matthew is not Elaine, their bonded and the usual third member of their target group, and Elaine is back in the settlement, three and a half months pregnant in a struggling, vicious world that is not well-suited to pregnant women. Neither Gabriel nor Marianne wish to lose her to a demon out in the Dust - and everyone has demons in the Dust, both theirs and those born for other people -, and their small settlement can ill-afford to lose either the child in Elaine’s womb or the woman’s own skills as a doctor.

After her colleague was killed last summer, Elaine is their settlement’s only doctor, and is desperately needed alive to pass her skills onto others. Gilbert can be seen annoying her for lessons on a twice-daily basis when he is back in New Spring - but Gilbert is frequently _not_ in the settlement, as he leads both a small target group (for targeted attacks on the demons and for scouting the area of the Dust outside their home) and larger retrieval groups (retrieving things that the target groups find that prove useful to New Spring but burdensome to carry in small numbers). Alfred, Matthew’s brother, is doing the best he can at his studies as well, but there is a lot to learn and he is even younger than Matthew.

Marianne hadn’t even _known_ that Elaine had been a doctor when she had helped seduce/annoy the other woman out of the nearest Holy City. How could she have known? On a trading visit to the City, Marianne had first found Elaine beautifully angry in a marketplace and tried to flirt with her, only for Elaine to elbow her with extreme prejudice in the spleen.

What kind of doctor fails the basic principles of all physicians: _do no harm_?!

“I do not like this,” says Gabriel, and there is frustration in his eyes, in the movement of his hand as it leaves the hilt of his sheathed sword to rake back the growing flop of rich brown curls in his face. (Marianne gets very frustrated about those curls as well, but for much more pleasant reasons than her other sources of stress. In her esteemed opinion, they are at least two-thirds of the reason Elaine is currently pregnant, because Gabriel cut his long hair some months ago and it left him with a close-cropped look that almost immediately began growing into an unfairly attractive mop of cherub curls, just the right length these days for tugging. Really, despite their contraceptives, it’s a wonder that Marianne isn’t pregnant as well.) “There are too many ghosts in these old places.”

Still standing beside him, Marianne looks out of the broken window as well.

Just after noon, the sun is hot and bright - and the shadows it casts in the ruined town they’ve come to for their mission are ominously dark. Weeds and the branches of trees shift slightly in the wind, but nothing else stirs.

That they can see.

“The ghosts don’t care enough to touch us, darling,” Marianne says, and turns her head to press a kiss to Gabriel’s shoulder, dusty as the cloth there is. “Worry about the living.”

  
  


**II.**

There is nothing particularly holy about the Holy Cities. They are not, however, _un_ holy: no demon has ever breached the walls of a Holy City, unlike many, many settlements out in the Dust.

In return for such safety, for stable government, the rebirth of human records, and the remnants of human technology and learning, residents of the Cities hand over near complete control of their lives. No-one can live in the Cities who wasn’t born there, and no-one can leave the Cities without - rarely-given - permission and be allowed to return. As children, residents are assigned and begin training for the roles and careers they will later assume in their lives, and though adults may marry whom they please from within their City, they must seek permission for every child they might wish to try and have.

As a doctor, Elaine had been unable to obtain permission from her City’s government for her to leave. She had left anyway, dressed in one of Gabriel’s borrowed shirts over her uniform’s trousers and under Marianne’s spare cloak, her bag of ‘belongings’ on her back - which had contained only a few shirts, some underwear, a spare pair of boots, a childhood toy, and a great deal of stolen antibiotics and opioids. Her boots had been stuffed with bandages and tiny bags of seeds, and clean suturing needles and syringes had been rolled up carefully in her socks.

None of them had known Elaine had taken the medicine; at least one of them would have dissuaded her from taking it if they had. The Holy City would have killed any of them if they had found it in their belongings - it was far too expensive for anyone from the Dust to trade for in such quantities.

When they had gotten back to New Spring and the doctor had - carefully - dumped her stolen supplies out on the floor before the stunned eyes of the settlement, no-one had known what to say. Elaine, green eyes blazing in a way that still hits Marianne with claws outstretched in her gut, had been defiant in the way she stood there, the pile of precious goods on the ground in front of her a good argument that her worth to New Spring outweighed the effort it would take to care for, shelter and feed her.

(Out of all of New Spring, Gilbert had recovered first from his shock, and he had strode across the floor to Elaine, grabbed her by the arms, and kissed her.

Marianne had been extremely pleased to watch Gilbert get kneed firmly in the groin.)

“So what do you think of life now,” Marianne had heard Gabriel murmur a few days later, when New Spring’s newest doctor had been in the process of giving them all a much-needed check-up, “this side of your City wall?”

If Marianne had not had the man in her own bed the night before, had not already known the lush taste of Elaine’s sharp mouth, and, more importantly, had not also been planning on asking Elaine a similar question with the exact same coy look under her eyelashes that Gabriel had been sporting like a shameless thunder-stealing whore, she could almost have been offended.

Fingers on Gabriel’s wrist, counting the beat of his pulse, Elaine had just hummed. “You know, I never knew there was so much sky?”

  
  


**III.**

Five minutes after they leave the old building they had holed up in for a quick rest, a pack of demons finds them. Passing in the deep dark shadow between two crumbling buildings, some old alley made more narrow as the walls on either side came down over the centuries, they are ambushed - five in front, and four behind. Half of the demons have fangs; most of them have long, needle-thin and rapier-sharp claws, and when one of them opens her mouth deep black ooze bubbles out and down her chin, its droplets hissing and spitting where they hit the cracked ground under her feet.

All of them have eyes as black as oil, pupil and sclera a unified wet malicious void. None of them, something inside Marianne is pleased to note, wear the faces of anyone she knows.

Gabriel, already covering their rear, moves off to handle the demons behind them. Marianne steps in front of Matthew, covering their only long-range fighter, so that, together, they can take down the demons in front.

These demons are weak, and die quickly. There is no real way of telling whether a demon is weak or strong until you fight them, because Marianne has killed demons both weak and strong that were wearing the same face. That wore the faces of her mother, her father. One that looked like Gabriel, who tricked half a retrieval team into thinking they were the _actual_ Gabriel and killed five people by ripping their hearts out from under their ribcages by putting a clawed hand through their chests. Another two on separate occasions that had worn Marianne’s own face, one still shrieking laughter as she - _it -_ died, and the other managing to slice open Marianne’s arm to the wet muscle beneath before Marianne had finally managed to slam her sword into its head.

In Marianne’s experience, it is only the weakest demons that come in packs. The ones that come alone usually have the strength to handle anything they come across by themselves - which makes them _extremely_ dangerous to encounter in small groups.

Marianne takes out three of the demons in front of her and Matthew with her sword, whilst Matthew’s arrows take out the other two. His aim is good - Marianne approves, for the bow has never been her own talent -, straight through the throat, eye and brain with three shots, but he still takes a shade too long to fire for him to be _very_ good. More practice will fix that, most likely.

(They live in a world where Matthew will have plenty of practice.)

Marianne does not worry about leaving Gabriel to fight four demons without aid for a few minutes. Long before Elaine, before bonding… Marianne has lived and worked and fought beside Gabriel since she was eight and he was only a little older, and she knows his gifts and strength. They know each other even better now. Now they are, with Elaine, bonded, with two exchanged amulets each on a cord around their necks: in the Cities where Marianne had been born, had they filled in the paperwork, they would be called husband, wife and wife.

Marianne does not worry about leaving Gabriel to fight four demons without aid for a few minutes, before she turns around and sees three dead demons on the ground and Gabriel’s sword faltering before a demon wearing the wide-eyed wounded look of a distraught child.

As far as anyone knows, demons do not have children. No-one knows where demons come from, or why they hate humanity so much, or even why they wear the forms and faces of those humans they hate.

That doesn’t make it easier for a worried expectant father to kill something wearing the face of a child.

 _“Gabriel,_ ” Marianne calls, half-anguish herself, seeing the way her bonded’s hand shakes, the way the demon’s hands lengthen into long, lethal black claws. He is too far away -

An arrow slams itself into the demon’s heart.

The child-demon half-turns, eyes widened in surprise even as it falls, and Matthew’s second arrow finds the left socket, tearing through the eyeball with precise force and cracking the skull behind.

Something wearing a child’s form hits the ground. A few moments later, it mercifully melts to some kind of black, oily mess - a thick stinking grime that will only burn away when the sunlight hits it. Marianne has some of the stuff from her own kills sticky on her hands, clinging to her hair. She shudders.

Gabriel stares at the mess on the ground in front of him. Carefully sheathes his sword, steps to the side of the alley so that Matthew can retrieve his arrows, and throws up.


End file.
